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This forum is so quiet compared to in the past. Where did everyone go to? Is there a forum somewhere else I don't know about? Hopefully you didn't all quit.

It's been really quiet for about 1-2 years now. The action here used to be fast and furious. There was an excitement to be a developer, in charge of your own business and destiny. Now, with so many apps and resultant lack of visibility, I think many developers have thrown in the towel, and have moved on to other things.

There are other boards where they discuss apps and programming. Just Google a programming problem and those boards show up. But the newness of it has worn off.

Me personally, I'm in between apps, might not do another app, not sure. I really enjoy this site though, it's been a big help and it's been nice being able to discuss the non technical side of things with people and vent some frustrations.

What we are most likely seeing is the free market at work. The app stores became a rapid race to the bottom as apps went from simple apps making money to a flood of work-alike clones and more spam than an email server.

At least two primary factors at play here, 1) the cost of creating a modern app 2) the return on that investment. 1 is about the time to learn all the new things. I've been here for some 6~8 years, look at the changes over that time. Huge changes in what high end apps are expected to do and the amount of knowledge a dev has to have.
2 is the flooded app stores, Apple not doing much about cloned/knocked off apps (CRApps).

Apple is actually doing us a favor by making the rules strict, who want's more CRApps?

64% of the users download ZERO apps in a month. That's a clue right there. The app store is a grave yard of dreams.

Microsoft proved decades ago that it's NOT about the software, it's about the marketing of the software. That's very true with the app store as the store itself is NOT a store at all. It's a distribution system that charges 30%.

Consider: If Apple allowed you to have your app downloaded direct from your own site, would you make more or less sales?

Imagine having a choice, sell your app on Apples app store and/or sell it yourself and keep the 30%.

That 30% could go towards marketing and be much more effective than what Apple does to 'earn' their 30% cut of the product you made.

It would be different if the app store was worth a dam, but given that it's a ghost town, it's clearly not working.

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The good news: After the weak go away, the strong can come in and take over. The strong can dump certain models that were forced upon us. Maybe free with ads can be scrapped or the ads can go back to non-intrusive. We can force the ad buyers to either pay for non-intrusive ads or run their ads on CRApps.

Just like eBay/CL and other markets, we control this. Let the weak die off, it's for the better, all they did was spam up the app store.

Let Apple restrict the apps and let the better apps take over. It'll become more and more expensive to develop apps and we'll see the weak apps go to the grave yard where they belong.